“I had a couple of big influences. When I was 16 I read a Graham Swift novel, Waterland, that did incredible things with parallel timelines, and told a story in different dimensions that was extremely coherent. Around the same time, I remember Alan Parker’s The Wall on television, which does a very similar thing purely with imagery, using memories and dreams crossing over to other dreams and so forth. Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Performance were also influential. Those stuck in my head, as did a lot of crime fiction—James Ellroy, Jim Thompson—and film noirs like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, which was just staggering. Then, somehow, I got hold of a script to Pulp Fiction before the film came out and was fascinated with what Tarantino had done.”
Writer/Director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Night Rises, Inception, Batman Begins)
DGA Quartlerly article The Traditionalist by Jeffrey Ressner
Christopher Nolan’s Influences
July 19, 2012 by Scott W. Smith